Upcoming State of Ceramics
Material Culture: Revealing Obfuscated Histories Power Dynamics Series
with Lauren Sandler
Saturday, March 1, 2025
10am - noon PST (that’s Los Angeles time), online.
State of Ceramics events are, and always will be, free.
Discussion Guide
Discussion guide coming soon!
About the Topic
Clay contains enormous historic, cultural, and economic content and context. What does it mean, as a discipline, to use materials embedded in a colonial, exploitative past, and ongoing practice of extraction and erasure? What do these narratives mean for our future, and what will our future narratives be?
As ceramic artists we are part of larger systems and structures. Multinational mining industries employ oppressive labor conditions and produce toxic environmental impacts. The minerals in our clays and glazes also exist in the batteries that power our cars, our cell phones, GPS navigational devices, surveillance equipment, and in military equipment used to wage wars. How do we reckon with our intimate and dependent connection to extraction and interrupt the subsequent erasure to reveal the complex and layered histories contained in the earth?
Ceramics as material culture tells stories, and through our work with clay, we unearth personal and collective stories. In this conversation, we will consider how clay can reveal, rupture, resist, and reconnect, and how we might disrupt legacies of consumption to reimagine ceramic pedagogy and practice.
About the Artist
Lauren Sandler is a ceramic artist and educator based in Philadelphia. Her work utilizes the layered and complex history of clay as a place to unearth stories, particularly those that have been erased, distorted, or rewritten. Sandler exhibits nationally, and gives talks, workshops, and publishes work concerning contemporary and historic issues in ceramics. She holds an MFA in Ceramics from Penn State University and undergraduate degrees in Anthropology and Ceramics from Ithaca College and SUNY New Paltz. She served on the Board of The National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts as Director at Large and is currently Associate Professor and Program Head of Ceramics at Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University.